The Tale of the Fly
There was once a fly who was sad because
the nozzle on the front of his head that he used to suck up shit
with was clogged.
He was hanging from the ceiling by his suction cups one day when
the doorbell rang. A centipede wearing a postman's cap handed
him a telegram inviting him to come to a book burning that evening
sponsored by the public library.
"Fascist pigs!" thought the fly, who was of a liberal
bent.
The emcee for the book burning was the actor who played Bozo
the Clown on TV in the 50s. Although now 105 years old and ensconced
in an iron lung, he was making a comeback. He communicated in
his own zany inimitable fashion through a series of loudspeakers
and walkie-talkies.
The fly checked his watch. He had half an hour to get ready.
He combed and polished his antennae and tied little yellow ribbons
to the hairs on his legs. His stomach rumbled and he remembered
that he hadn't eaten for several days because his shit-nozzle
was clogged.
The library was enclosed by a ten-foot cast iron fence topped
with sharp spikes designed to impale anyone who tried to climb
over it. A flag flew from the rooftop emblazoned with the image
of a burning book against a field of barbed wire. On the lawn
a huge bonfire crackled and popped, shooting the black ashes
of banned books into the sky like confetti. An immense throng
of book burners, onlookers and camp followers danced around the
fire, hooting, snorting and hollering. Bozo, in his iron lung,
stood off to one side with his entourage, egging the crowd on
with rants, platitudes and invectives broadcast from the loudspeakers
on the roof. He became so inflamed with his own rhetoric that
he lost control of his bowels and a thin stream of diahrreah
trickled from a crack in the iron lung.
The fly observed all of this from his vantage point on top of
a dead chicken whose head had been bitten off in a frenzy by
one of the revelers. The odor of fresh blood wafted past the
fly's olfactory apparatus. An ox was being sacrificed on an altar
built of wicker lawn furniture and old eyeglasses. Stretching
off into the distance, a long line of people waited to sacrifice
an animal or even a small child to Desi Arnaz, Regis Philbin,
Liberace, Marge the Palmolive Lady, or any one of the other numerous
local deities.
"I wish my shit-nozzle wasn't clogged," thought the
fly as he gazed longingly at a big, fresh, juicy turd deposited
on the ground in front of him by what looked like a cross between
a giraffe and a doberman pinscher.
"Boy, the things they can do with cloning these days,"
thought the fly. "Maybe I could get a graft that would..."
The fly's thought was cut short by a huge dollop of diahrreah
from Bozo's iron lung which knocked him to the ground unconscious.
When he came to, Jesus was standing in front of him stretching
out four of his six arms in sympathy. The fly was dazzled by
the glow from Jesus' heavenly wings and the beatific expression
in his compound eyes.
"Here," said Jesus, "drink this." He handed
the fly a plastic bottle. The label read "Spiritual Drain-O."
"I'm sorry." said the fly, "but I don't drink
anything offered to me by a hallucination."
"Besides," he added, "I'm Jewish."
"Suit yerself," said Jesus and he disappeared into
the sky in a shaft of silver light. Before the fly had time to
think, a huge foot encased in a brown leather Thom McCann shoe
squashed him flat. Which just goes to show-centipedes can't be
trusted.
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